IMPROVING YOUR IMPROV

For Charles Darwin, improvisation was an essential foundation of evolutionary success. ‘[It is] those who have learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively who have prevailed,’ he wrote in On the Origin of Species. For many musicians however, the word ‘improvisation’ can sound uncannily like the phrase ‘tooth extraction without anaesthetic.’ If improvisation is vital for our success as a species, why is it that so few of us feel able to conquer our fears of improvising at the piano, even in private?

One answer could be that the best improvisers are simply differently wired to the rest of us. As Jessica Duchen suggests in her cover article, Gabriela Montero’s brain might have peculiar neural pathways which aren’t found in most other craniums. She was born an improviser. Th at’s how she can take former Prime Minister David Cameron’s sad little hum as he announced he was leaving office, and instantly turn it into a fabulously perky invention in the style of Bach. (Search for ‘Cameron hums!’ on YouTube: it’s amazing.) In those biological terms, I suppose the only option for the rest of us is a hopeful stab at reincarnation.

But even without metempsychosis, is it possible we might still be able at least to lose our terrors, and get a? To get some ideas about how this might be managed, I spoke to three superb improvisers – Steven Osborne, Dominic Ferris and Nahre Sol – about their approaches to the subject, and to winkle out some tips for improvement.